JHU ARCS Foundation Scholarship awarded to BME Sohail Zahid

Sohail Zahid, a graduate student in the Computational Cardiology Lab of Dr. Natalia Trayanova, Murray B. Sachs Endowed Chair and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has been awarded the Johns Hopkins University’s 2015–2016 ARCS Foundation Scholarship.

The ARCS Foundation noted that Sohail’s application stood apart in a highly competitive pool of outstanding and deserving students. The graduate award of $15,000 can be used for education-related expenses such as tuition, books, supplies, travel to conferences, research activities as well as other needs.

Dr. Trayanova remarked “I am a very lucky research advisor to have in my lab someone like Sohail. He is an outstanding PhD candidate, someone who fully embodies what Johns Hopkins University stands for: an extraordinary researcher, a stellar student, and already a leader in my lab.”

Sohail’s PhD project is on atrial fibrillation (AF), which is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, affecting over two million people in the US. A large portion of this affected population also develops atrial fibrosis that sustains and perpetuates the arrhythmia. Sohail’s project will employ novel patient-specific modeling approach to predict and uncover the contribution of the unique atrial fibrotic distribution to the development and maintenance of AF in a given patient. Based on the results of the simulations, we expect to be able to predict the optimal patient-specific strategy for AF ablation.

BME graduate students Kunal Parikh and Kristen Kozielski were also awarded the 2015-2016 Johns Hopkins ARCS Foundation Scholarship.

The Department of Biomedical Engineering congratulates Sohail, Kunai and Kristen on their scholarship awards.